Not at Home on the Range: Peer Production and the Urban/Rural Divide

TL;DR

This paper examines how peer-produced geographic content like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap varies in quality and contributor engagement between rural and urban areas, highlighting systemic challenges and potential solutions.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of rural versus urban content quality and contributor patterns in peer production platforms, revealing systemic disparities.

Findings

Rural content quality is systematically lower.

Fewer local contributors focus on rural areas.

Automated agents are more involved in rural content.

Abstract

Wikipedia articles about places, OpenStreetMap features, and other forms of peer-produced content have become critical sources of geographic knowledge for humans and intelligent technologies. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of the peer production model across the rural/urban divide, a divide that has been shown to be an important factor in many online social systems. We find that in both Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, peer-produced content about rural areas is of systematically lower quality, is less likely to have been produced by contributors who focus on the local area, and is more likely to have been generated by automated software agents (i.e. bots). We then codify the systemic challenges inherent to characterizing rural phenomena through peer production and discuss potential solutions.